What's Steve McLaughlin's problem? How did a state assemblyman so quickly deteriorate from a promising and engaging legislator into such an embarrassment?

Part of his decline, certainly, is an inability to come to terms with the need for tougher gun laws. But that alone isn't it: Mr. McLaughlin, a Republican from the Rensselaer County hamlet of Melrose, has plenty of company on that point. What Mr. McLaughlin lost along the way is civility.

Nor is he alone there. Civility has been a casualty in the crossfire between advocates of gun control and gun rights in the aftermath of the Newtown school massacre that took 27 lives. Even as most Americans came away from that horror with a new awareness of the need for better gun control, too many gun advocates became increasingly shrill in their defense of their perceived right to acquire whatever arms they want. Even talk of armed insurrection — of overthrowing the government in the name of American patriotism — is now tossed about.

Missing, too, in Mr. McLaughlan's rhetorical arsenal is the fundamental understanding of history and government that's essential to a sober, reasoned debate.

There he was on Tuesday, chiming in with the chorus of criticism of the heavy-handed way Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders secured passage last month of what is, for the most part, a sensible gun law. Using what's called a message of necessity, the governor enabled legislators to vote on the bills without the usual three-day waiting period.

"We're told basically to shut up and vote, and that's what this is all about," Mr. McLaughlin said. "Just don't question it, just vote. That's basically the message here. If that's not dictatorial, I don't know what is."

If only he could have shut himself up there, guilty of perhaps nothing more than failing to fully appreciate the difference between a dictatorship and a democratic process too quick to short-circuit full debate. (Legislators voted, after all. Mr. McLaughlin's point of view lost in a vote that, not incidentally, was bipartisan.)

But there was to be more.

"Hitler would be proud," Mr. McLaughlin ranted. "Mussolini would be proud of what we did here. Moscow would be proud. But that's not democracy."

What, if anything, was this man thinking? There are ways to express indignation, after all, without making a spectacle of oneself.

Plenty of others, including us, have criticized the process by which this bill became law, but without ignorantly invoking two of the most evil people in human history.

A few hours later, Mr. McLaughlin engaged in the ritual of contrition common in American politics these days: part apology, part excuse, part deflection.

Of course he's sorry — sorry that he's exiled himself to the political fringe. That's a sad process that began, in retrospect, with Mr. McLaughlin's comments at a Jan. 19 pro-gun rally at the Capitol.

"They confiscate our guns, they confiscate our freedom," he declared.

Ah, Mr. McLaughlin, who's talking about confiscation?

Worse, he said that day that the new gun law was the result of "political violence."

Come again, please?

Perhaps Mr. McLaughlin will come to live down his intemperate and utterly uninformed remarks. For now, though, he's rendered himself pretty much useless in the useful and ongoing campaign to stop the abuse of messages of necessity.